Is God Mean?

There’s a new book out now by Catholic theologian Ulrich Lehner, called God Is Not Nice.I’ll be publishing an interview with him about it soon, but having learned yesterday that the book is now in stores, I didn’t want another day to go by without alerting you to it. It’s a serious book that is easily accessible to the general reader and urgently needed by him. It’s a book that I wish I could put into the hands of every Christian parent, pastor, and educator. It’s a powerful weapon for fighting the sentimental pseudo-Christianity we call Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.

Lehner writes:

Our faith has a name for the inclination to disregard God’s order, and that is “original sin.” … The philosopher Hans-Eduard Hengstenberg has therefore spoken of the major decision in each person’s life: we either approach concrete beings according to their inherent order or we surrender them to “our egotistical exploitation.” If we decide to see things and persons within the horizon of their natural goals and order, we tend to get to know them more intimately, we learn to love them, and we mature in our will. If, however, we turn away from this order, we see everything only from our own perspective. The first stance is a natural piety toward the entire world, which we can call Christian realism. The second option is what most of the secular world is doing. Of course we will continue to fail, due to our fallen nature, but the more firmly we decide to approach beings according to their inherent order, the more we will cling to grace and sacramental forgiveness and can hope to make some progress, because we will see the world with “God’s eyes” and not through the lenses of selfishness.

More:

Realism means being in touch with the real world, with real things. Often I have the impression that we are running away from reality and focusing on feels as if emotions were the only real thing. Through my experience with religious education textbooks and catechesis classes in both Germany and the United States, I have come to see that much of our parish life is centered on sentimentality or the chasing of feelings. Children are invited to “feel” and “experience” this or that, but they are rarely given any content for their faith. It does not surprise me that they leave the Church if they find better feelings elsewhere.

The research on how theologically and morally vacant young American adults are today is staggering. I’ll be talking about some of it tonight at my Notre Dame lecture on the Benedict Option , in part as an answer to Jesuit Father and papal adviser Antonio Spadaro’s risible claim that things aren’t so bad in the Christian West.

In the context of Lehner’s book — which, again, is written for the man and woman in the pews, not for academics — I want to draw attention to this piece about Bart Campolo, son of leading progressive Evangelical pastor Tony Campolo. Campolo fils left the Christian faith for atheism. Excerpt:

Campolo doesn’t think he’s a special case. On the contrary, he believes the current world of ‘progressive Christianity’ (what he calls “the ragged edge” of Christianity) is heading towards full-blown unbelief. Speaking during the Wild Goose Festival (the American version of Greenbelt) Bart was clear: “What I know is if there’s 1,000 people at Wild Goose today, then in 10 years from now three or four hundred of those people won’t be in the game anymore.”

Campolo is predicting that as many as 40% of progressive Christians will become atheists over the next decade. In his view, the process of abandoning Christian doctrines is almost addictive. Once you start, you don’t know where to stop. It might begin with “dialing down” your view of God’s sovereignty, but it could easily end with unbelief.

“When you get to this ragged edge of Christianity when people say ‘God’ they sort of mean ‘the universe’ and when they say ‘Jesus’ they sort of mean ‘redemption’ – they’re so progressive they don’t actually count on any supernatural stuff to happen, they’ve dialed it down in the same way I did.”

When Campolo changed his theology to match his experience, it was the beginning of the end.

Bart says he’s “skipped over” the “progressive re-vamping” of Christianity and gone straight to the logical conclusion that God doesn’t exist. He reckons that Progressive Christians should stop pretending God exists in the form of “the universe” or other wishy-washy language.

Moralistic Therapeutic Deism — even in its right-wing forms — is the last stop on the way out the door to unbelief. Once you start determining religious and moral truth by what feels right to you, there’s no way to stop the unraveling. The fact that most American Christians (as Christian Smith and others have shown) are in fact MTDers, and the church in general is not pushing back on this, is a harbinger of collapse. The title God Is Not Nice is not meant to say that God is mean, but rather that He is wild and undomesticated. He is not nice; he is holy. Lehner is here speaking of God as C.S. Lewis’s Mr. Beaver spoke about Aslan: “Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”

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72 Responses to Is God Mean?

I had ordered an advance copy of this book, it arrived the other day for me from Amazon, I am maybe 1/3 of the way through it, lots of good thought on how we have perverted our view of God and tailored our view of God to us and our selfish personal desires, rather than realizing that God is great and, well, we aren’t God, even though we often treat God as our personal tool.

Don’t let the title of the book or chapters put you off, there is a lot of good thought in this book.

One so tires of “Of course, what’s important is that he or she is happy.” No, what’s important is that he does his duty — or, as the Catechism used to say, “Know, love and serve God in this world and be happy with Him in the next.”

During my time as a United Methodist pastor, I served some time on the district board of ordained ministry (which basically is a step that candidates for ordination go through during their process). Part of the process included paperwork that candidates articulate answers to some fairly basic theological questions. A pretty sizable percentage (and this is in the fairly conservative Central Texas conference) couldn’t articulate basic Christian beliefs well – not because they weren’t smart enough or articulate enough, but because they frankly didn’t hold to straightforward historic orthodox Christian beliefs and were trying to thread the needle of putting Christianish beliefs out there and not identify themselves as “one of those mean conservatives like the Southern Baptists” – which in Texas, particularly in rural Texas, is the default understanding of what conservative evangelical Protestant Christianity looks like.

I remember question a couple of these candidates and just flat out asking them – if you don’t really believe this stuff, why do you want to be a pastor in the first place? I never could get a decent answer to that question. My thought was, if you want to do good work in the world and you don’t believe this stuff – be a social worker, a teacher, a counselor – there’s plenty of places in the helping professions that don’t require you to sign off on historic Christian belief – or even go to a denomination that doesn’t claim to believe it (Unitarian Universalist, UCC, Episcopal, whatever).

But the intellectual honesty required to just let go of the trappings of Christian belief and admit to oneself that is just not who you are. A cheerful skeptic who still wants to help people in my experience is a lot more useful to the world than a nominal believer who is undermining the church they represent every step of the way.

Rod, Great post. Thanks again. You’re right about the importance of parents understanding the difference between MTD and the true, historical, orthodox beliefs of Christianity, and how that should impact our daily lives. A great book that I just found that teaches much of this on a level that middle-schoolers can understand is called “The Radical Book For Kids”, by Champ Thornton. It is a delightful smorgasbord of solid church history, martyrs, doctrinal beliefs, and basic practical stuff for kids like “Your Parents Aren’t Perfect”, “How to Clean Your Room”, and “What to do when bad things happen” where he does a simple exposition of Romans 8:22-32 applying it to times of suffering. It is fantastic, as I’m sure you will see if you check it out.
In His Grace,
Paul

I look forward to your interview with the author — my husband will probably order the book from the library when it becomes available there. We are Eastern Orthodox Christians and the original sin explanation of Blessed Augustine is not at the top of my hit list of a place to start with young Christians in the home. I favor Fr. John Behr’s Becoming Human as a book to recommend to people curious about God. I do agree that MTD is real and have to quote St. Paisios “Everything I see around me would make me go insane if I did not believe that God will have the last word.” I also very much like C.S. Lewis and the quote you refer to here at the end. “He is not a tame lion” but I’m not sure I agree with the way you’re using it here. However, I will read the interview you will post and then perhaps the book and think that through some more. Thanks for posting. Having children has caused me to be very interested in helping them to attend to what is indeed REAL, Reality and Truth (God).

I don’t know Bart Campolo’s views in particular, but it does seem sort of odd to me, logically, to think that the most simple jump would be from “Christianity isn’t true” to “God doesn’t exist.” There are a lot of different versions of belief in God that don’t depend on belief in Christianity. Materialism seems to me to be a much more difficult to sustain position than any sort of supernatural belief in God. Or does Bart simply mean that he thinks the Christian God in particular doesn’t exist? That wouldn’t really be atheism, though, at least as I understand the term.

I think it’s much more likely that progressive Christians would come to identify as deists, pantheists, or agnostics than as atheists per se. I mean, we have a lot of evidence that most people who don’t consider themselves to be religious still profess a belief in the existence of (some definition of) God.

But then that’s what we would expect to see if God actually does exist, and especially if He has patterned the universe in such a manner as to communicate His existence to perceptive creatures within it.

Plus progressive Christians, generally speaking, seem to be motivated in their beliefs by a strong desire for justice and kindness, and the position of atheism would seem to make it very hard to maintain a commitment to those terms. Working toward social justice, eliminating oppression, advocating for the weak and powerless, etc. makes a lot more sense if one believes in an ideal cosmic order than if one believes in pure materialism.

That is all to say, I don’t think that MTD is primarily a waypoint on the path to atheism. I think for a lot of people, MTD is a very comfortable endpoint to remain at. Though I certainly agree that it’s not going to cause people to want to maintain a commitment to a church, or resist the consumerist indoctrination of mass culture.

[Once you start determining religious and moral truth by what feels right to you, there’s no way to stop the unraveling.]

And this is why the Benedict Option Only works in the long, broad view for faiths with capital T, Tradition traditions. It’s much bigger than

This is why your book has gotten such uneven traction. Because you obfuscate this point in a notable effort to appeal ecumenically to all Christian.

Your book takes the first step by setting up a baseline distinction of “orthodoxy”, but doesn’t take the step of honestly admitting that this is built on an apostolic, Traditional understanding of liturgy and doctrine.

How is orthodoxy defined as anything more that “what feels right” if not governed by an extrinsic authority?

Otherwise orthodoxy is defined by a transient resistance to a force of change or worse just a personality cult of enforcement.

The Benedict Option is only a serious long term model for Orthodox, Catholic, Coptic, and a few other Christian traditions for the very reasons that you love to talk about on this blog but refuse to follow through to the logical conclusion for fear of turning off most of your potential audience.

rE: Campolo is predicting that as many as 40% of progressive Christians will become atheists over the next decade.

I very much doubt this. I’ve seen no one become an atheist after they reach full maturity. I’m sure it happens, but usually that is something that is set by the late teens. What Campolo should have said is that some fraction of those people may end up as unchurched Deists, “Spiritual but not religious”, which certainly is something I’ve seen happen fairly often, including among people from “conservative” churches when people grow disillusioned with them. And meanwhile some people may go the other way, becoming much more orthodox (small “o”) and attending a more conservative church out of dissatisfaction with a liberal one. You can see that especially along Catholics and Episcopalians.

This is conservative Christianity’s big problem, I think. It’s right that without a “God’s eye view” of a natural order it is a very hard sell.

But Christian theologies conception of that natural order is heavily based in a Aristotlian, Ptolemaic view of nature.

If you look at nature and see creates seeming beings in the center of orderly universe, there since creation, the Christian God makes sense.

In ours, where our creation was “guided” by the murder of least fit beings over and over over 100,000s of generations, at best like the breeding of cattle, on a planet in a corner of an infinite universe, only arriving a few million years ago in a billions years old galaxy, it makes sense. Why would the God of that universe incarnate here? Why would he care what we do? Why would we believe him?

Nature, as the modern world understands it, points to the great old ones, not Yahweh.

“When Campolo changed his theology to match his experience, it was the beginning of the end.”

So you want a religion in which we ignore our experiences, our feelings, and our consciences, in favor of following the edicts of our religious superiors? The only good thing I can see about that religion is that it will be small.

Bart Campolo speaks an unwelcome truth. I see a lot of my progressive Christian friends ranting about gender or identity with a fervor they would never show toward the deity of Jesus or His resurrection. Increasingly I get the sense that if you pressed them, many of them would admit to not really believing in the resurrection.

Which God? Old Testament? New Testament? Protestant? Catholic? Jewish? Islamic? Hindu? Or the God that most people individually think of and rarely has anything to do with any of the “official” Gods? If we are talking about the Noah/Isaac/Abraham etc. God, then “mean” is too kind. Cruel. Vindictive. Petty. Narcissistic. Those would describe that God. For me, the best description is “irrelevant” . And to be honest, I think that describes the vast majority of people, even those who claim to be deeply religious. Certainly I see no sign that most religious people actually take their beliefs seriously based on how they live their lives. Religion in the US is now largely cultural. It is well on the way to becoming what Shinto is in Japan. A collection of mutually shared holidays and traditions and rituals with no real significance. Just look at Easter, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Halloween, or St Patrick’s Day. All started out as purely religious celebrations, and now enjoy the same status Mother’s Day.

It’s like the Fundie preacher in Spain exasperated by his lack of success. He decides to ask a local that he’s become acquainted with why no one is interested in being Born Again and Saved. The Spaniard matter of factly says, “If we don’t even believe in the One True Church, why would we be interested in your sectarianism?”

Likewise, it’s never made any sense as to why there is such a thing as “Progressive Christians”. If you don’t buy a full throated orthodoxy, just sleep in on Sunday. I know I sure would, maybe going to High Church parishes once in a while for the free concert.

Watch out for nominalism! In God reason and will coincide, so the punishment for rejecting the order is the very fact of placing ourselves outside of it. As Dante makes clear, sin is its own punishment. In that sense God in not mean. The nominalist idea that God’ punishment reflects an arbitrary (“mean”) will is precisely the source of the Protestant split between conservatives and liberals, and ultimately the reason why liberal protestantism must end up in loss of faith.

Rod, the piece by Sam Hailes on Bart Campolo that your link goes to contains the following explanation by Campolo of how he began to lose his faith after he was “exposed to urban poverty”.

Prior to that exposure, Campolo says, “I had a theology that said God could intervene and do stuff.”

But after his experience with urban poverty, he says, “I had to change my understanding of God. Sovereignty had to get dialed down a bit.”

And from there it was apparently a slippery slope that ended in not believing in God at all.

But isn’t Campolo’s description just a classic case of a young person getting introduced to a hard world, unprepared because he apparently thought God could be expected to operate rather like a Super Fairy with a magic wand?

It seems like he had a perhaps common child-like perception of God at that point.

Of course that needed to change and mature.

So the question is—why did it “mature” into atheism instead of developing into a deeper take on God?

Many people are well acquainted at a young age with the harsh realities of the world and the fact that prayers don’t necessarily get magically answered.

I think this has been a common human experience for eons.

But Campolo’s basic faith was shattered by the experience (second-hand, one might assume), of urban poverty.

It was a shallow and brittle sort of faith, then, to begin with, it seems like.

He had not been taught how to think about the many problems for which prayer and belief seem to bring no direct answer. He had no concept of the dark night of the soul and how to perceive it.

This comes down to a very good argument for atheism and if not atheism then most definitely apatheism. If God is like that, in what way is He in any way deserving of worship? Would we not be eminently justified in shaking the dust off our boots at Him and just ignoring everything about him? Why pray to a psychotic eight year old with a big chemistry set?

Holy, whatever in Hell that may be, just does not cut it. This God is closer to Marvin the Martian than anything else.

Is God nice? Well, a god’s a reflection and projection of the mental state of those who created him, and in the case of the Christian god, was created by people traumatized by the Roman (and various empires before that) occupation & its associated violence and oppression. The resulting god is probably not resonant with your average normal, prosperous, mentally healthy American, hence MTD.

All these arguments are either shallow and simplistic, or narrow and incomplete.

I don’t have a charismatic emotional experience of God, but, I have a definite sense that my life has gone considerably better than I have any right or reason to expect from the random operation of a cold, indifferent, universe. And, although public acting out of the emotional forms of charisma can be pure manipulation and self-serving play acting, I can recognize that some people have a genuine sense of God that I don’t.

Like Leonard Cohen wrote, “All of you have seen the dance, that God has kept from me.” Its true that reducing faith to liberal good works is uninspiring. But its also true that nature in its raw, pristine, form is not exactly well ordered for any kind of ethical system, suggesting we have a role in taming and ordering the state of nature to bring it closer to what God may have intended.

Its not easy to reduce this to a single book, and it probably shouldn’t be easy, or even possible. But no, God is not tame.

I thank you for GOD IS NOT NICE. I think I first spotted the title on this blog and pre-ordered a copy. I could not put it down and have now purchased copies for all the students in my introductory theology course for Catholic deacons. It is especially amazing because it comes from a theologian with outstanding academic credentials who addresses a general audience as a fellow Christian–without a hint of the condescension many of us have come to expect from academics today.

Could it be that a beloved but prodigal child comes along to remind us that in God’s realm “the Christian family” is a spiritual, not a biological or humanly created one? That is the clear teaching of Jesus the home wrecker (Luke 12:52).

Believing parents certainly have a great responsibility to faithfully and seriously disciple their children, but we cannot be deterministic in our outlook nor make our natural or adoptive families an idol in the process.

Would you please create a tag called “books” or otherwise post on all the books you’ve featured on your blog or read over the past year? (Yes, yes, Benedict Option, ok already.) Sometimes I try to recall something, and I just can’t find it without scrolling back through time trying to find the right post. Or else, about this time of year, I’m looking for books to add to my Christmas list and I’d like to have a quick way of searching. Thank you.

Some posters here apparently think that questioning traditional Christianity is like stepping on to a slippery slope. I prefer a ‘house of cards’ analogy. Here’s a thought experiment:

Imagine a toy house built from cards marked ‘virgin birth’, ‘bodily resurrection’, ‘miracle stories’, etc. The house can stand on its own, but if you withdraw even one card [doesn’t matter which] it will collapse.

The problem with both the slippery-slope and house-of-cards models is the same: if Christian belief is so unstable, it shouldn’t have lasted 2000 years!

I admire and respect the longevity of the RC Church and other Eastern and Middle-Eastern Christian churches. In particular, I find the laser-like focus of the RC Church on self-preservation over centuries to be amazing. One strategy for survival is to adapt to a changing environment, and the RC Church does seem to adapt, although often with a long time lag. I have a sense, though, that many conservatives think that a church that changes is not worth preserving.

Finally, in most contemporary religions there is a discrepancy between what the priests and preachers are teaching and what the congregation are doing and believing. Here’s a useful recent article on this topic:

I suspect that this discrepancy between doctrine and practice is not a new thing in Christianity, and is not a sign of imminent collapse. Also, this article discusses sociological research showing that religious people are not more moral than the non-religious, they just think they [but that is a bit off topic].

Moralistic Therapeutic Deism — even in its right-wing forms — is the last stop on the way out the door to unbelief. Once you start determining religious and moral truth by what feels right to you, there’s no way to stop the unraveling.

I don’t think this is right or, at least, it’s not the whole story.

Rod often reminds us that secularists in mainstream culture don’t really understand Christians or Christianity and make howling errors when they try to interpret Christian life and Christian goals. I think this is absolutely correct but the epistemic barrier blocks our ability to see in both directions. Christian writers are just as likely to mischaracterise or misinterpret atheists as the other way around.

Take this statement, for example, from Trin:

I don’t know Bart Campolo’s views in particular, but it does seem sort of odd to me, logically, to think that the most simple jump would be from “Christianity isn’t true” to “God doesn’t exist.”

I can’t speak for all atheists but, for me, I went from “Haven’t really thought about it.” to “Now that I’ve thought about it. I don’t think it’s true.” when I was about seven.

I think that’s the epistemic position of the vast majority of people: whether they are secular or religious, orthodox, conservative or progressive, most folks are haven’t-really-thought-about-it-ists and just cruise along in with the beliefs they were brought up to believe. When, eventually, they do think about it, they either conclude that it’s true (as, obviously, many of the fine people here have done) or (as I did) they decide that it’s probably not true.

Most people can go for a long time without really thinking about whether or not the bible is true but the slippery slope begins as soon as they start to question. Progressive churches are more susceptible to losing believers because they are more open to questioning but conservative and orthodox churches are susceptible too because they have more doctrines that are more obviously questionable. I think Rod puts too much weight on this idea that it’s about feelings.

Bart Ehrman has a lovely story at the start of his book Misquoting Jesus where he explains that his descent into agnosticism began when a professor told him that “Maybe Mark made a mistake.” Ehrman had previously been taught that the bible was without errors. Once he understood the possibility that gospel writers might make mistakes, he started to question everything. Had Ehrman been brought up in a church with less rigid teaching, his faith might’ve survived the episode.

Rod’s insistence that same-sex marriage is a hill to die on is a mistake for similar reasons. For many of the next generation this is a question that simply MUST be asked and when they come up with the wrong answer, they will question everything.

It’s not a matter of Moral Therapeutic Deism having insufficiently orthodox beliefs, or of emotivism and believing what feels good, or of having something better to do on a Sunday morning. Most people just haven’t thought about it very much and when they do, they will start to ask questions and will come up with answers that you don’t like.

I don’t mean to suggest that *all* of those people leaving religion have thought about it and decided that it’s not true. No. Most people haven’t really thought about it at all. Most of the leavers were probably only nominally Christian to begin with.

But, in my experience, most of the people who eventually became atheists did so because they thought about it a lot and decided that Christianity wasn’t true. I can think of precisely zero people who doubted Christianity’s supernatural claims and went in search of some different supernatural claims to believe in. As an outsider but a long time reader, I think Rod gives this point insufficient attention and understanding it is crucial to the survival of Christianity as a cultural force.

“Realism means being in touch with the real world, with real things. Often I have the impression that we are running away from reality and focusing on feels as if emotions were the only real thing.”

“Once you start determining religious and moral truth by what feels right to you, there’s no way to stop the unraveling.”

Feeling. Emotion. Christians faced with a decline in the numbers of persons identifying as Christians, a decline in the apparent influence of Christianity in the broader society, a decline in perceived orthodoxy among groups self-identifying as Christians, often take solace in the notion that such decline is grounded in the use of feeling/emotion to determine what’s true. Portraying “orthodox” Christians as realists standing against emotivism/expressivism in defending capital “T” Truth appears to help certain Christians feel better about decline. If both God and rationality are for us, how can so many be against us?

However, such an analysis ignores a problem that was present in the Apostolic Age and has survived with varying degrees of intensity up to the present. Christianity is difficult to believe. Incarnation, Resurrection, Trinity – few specifically Christian doctrines are congruent with the normal experience of humans. Most are incongruent with “common” sense. All are based upon the witness of people dead for two millennia. To blame the decline of Christianity in the modern West on feeling seems to ignore how difficult it is for a person to embrace Christian doctrine on the level of “understanding.”

“Consequently the believing Christian both has and uses his understanding, respects the universally human, does not explain someone’s not becoming a Christian as a lack of understanding, but believes Christianity against the understanding and here uses the understanding–in order to see to it that he believes against the understanding. Therefore he cannot believe nonsense against the understanding, which one might fear, because the understanding will penetratingly perceive that it is nonsense and hinder him in believing it, but he uses the understanding so much that through it he becomes aware of the incomprehensible, and now, believing, he relates himself to it against the understanding.”

The God David Bentley Hart describes in Being, Consciousness, Bliss is the God of Christianity, but also of various other credal formulations. His formulation also describes the philosophical God of Greek monotheism. Christianity, especially Catholic and Orthodox Christianity have connected this God with the God of Jewish and Christian revelation (though the Catholics have generally done more with the abstract and philosophical side of theoogy than have the Orthodox). But the connection between the formulations of “classical theism” and Christianity are not completely obvious. Could one not avoid what Rod calls Moralistic Therapeutic Deism while “falling away” from Christian belief in its particularity, while still holding to classical theism, a la David Bentley Hart? Or is there no such thing as “generic unparticularized classical theism,” only particularizations of this, in the form of Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, Sikhism, and so on?

I know someone who is a serious scholar of Neoplatonism, who left Christianity because of its particular, historical claims; he’d be a Neoplatonist if there was such a formal religion. Such a person has not fallen away in the sense that a MTD fuzzy modern person has.

I sometimes (and probably not often enough) pray, “Let me live according to what is Real.” I think that this fits in with what commenter Margaret posted above, in her last sentence.

I think the real driver for loss of faith is shifting tribal loyalties. One starts out loyal to his Christian tribe, but begins to see benefits of belonging to another tribe. Not material benefits, but just noticing that the other tribe has good stuff too, and maybe something to teach his tribe.
At some point it goes beyond wanting to just borrow ideas and styles from that tribe and truly belonging by adopting their points of departure and rules of logic. At first it seems that he can have dual loyalty, but not really: the new rules of logic are incompatible with faith and will eventually destroy it. He eventually sheds his former tribal affiliations for new ones, and it seems to him that the movement was based on logic and evidence, and on a superficial level it was, but on a deeper level the shift in loyalty preceded it.

Spirituality is the one place where lots of super successful people expect niceness to rule. In schools, the trend is to marinate kids in some kind of rigor, with the best taking a bajillion AP courses. In sports, it’s not enough to have a basketball coach who has you run some wind sprints. No, you need to join a year-round AAU team that essentially gives your kid what would have been a college level experience just a generation ago. Schedule schedule schedule demand demand demand TIGER MOM.

Even in people’s diets, there is a tendency among the fitness conscious to create these bizarre ascetic extremes. Aerobics has become P90X. 10Ks become marathons, which become ultra-marathons.

It’s not that people are not willing to suffer. But they are only willing to suffer in ways that signal different kinds of virtues to different kinds of people. Tough Mudders and the Biggest Loser and Gluten Free Diets are the novenas of the modern age.

What right do you have, Mr. Priest, to tell me to marry at a certain time, or what to do with my body or my kids? Pshaw. Now if you excuse me, I need pick up my kid from Mandarin lessons, drop him of at aikido lessons,then head to the gym for a six-hour work out to further develop my unnaturally bulging abdominal muscles or the cool kids at my class reunion will think me quite gauche.

I’m not pretending to read your thoughts. I read your book and I am describing where I believe it limits itself by not going to the logical end of describing the type of faith required for any Benedict Option type community.

The only assumption I made was that you were motivate to remain somewhat ecumenical in order to reach a larger audience. Is that false or unreasonable? It’s not a bad thing. I just think that it limits the discussion and has contributed to the rocky adoption of your ideas.

[NFR: You are pretending to read my thoughts. I wanted to reach a wide audience, it is true. I have gotten to know far too many Evangelicals who are good men and women — better Christians than I am — who I consider friends and allies. I don’t quite know how people who don’t share an older ecclesiology and sacramental mentality are going to make it through liquid modernity, but I want to help them as best I can, and receive help from them (because it’s not like we Orthodox and Catholics have it all figured out). My book is limited by its wide scope, but I am clear in it that the Ben Op will look different for, say, Southern Baptists than for Catholics. We have to do the best we can within our own traditions, unless, of course, we convert to something else. I think it entirely unrealistic to expect every Christian in America to convert to Orthodoxy. Besides, I know a lot of Evangelicals whose lives have been more clearly transformed by the Gospel than the lives of some Orthodox. Let us be humble and learn from each other. — RD]

Anecdote ≠ data, to be sure, but my own near-death experience in my late 20’s was an early step on my path to disbelief in my early 30’s.

For more non-data anecdotes, you can visit exchristian.net anytime. Lots of people’s long-held doubts find succor and fruition in maturity.

…he apparently thought God could be expected to operate rather like a Super Fairy with a magic wand

Based on a direct reading of scripture, this is exactly how any reasonable person would expect God to operate, at least some of the time. Call it a shallow and brittle perspective if you like, but it’s not unreasonable. #I’mWithThomas.

Your view seems logical, unless you aproach creation as an interactive work of art in which aspects of the creation have influence on the final result, but the artists vision will ultimately be made manifest. Creation is not complete and every part of it is of equal concern to the artist as every part of it will affect the final work.

You are putting words in Rods mouth, as though that were actually his unstated conclusion. NO. If you accept that your feelings are the some toral of your experience and make decisions based on your feelings because you have no basis in rational thought or solid educational grounding (which many churches and, yes, schools have failed to provide), then you will make stupid decisions based on your “experience”.

I’ve spent many quiet hours thinking about the New Age version of MTD, a mindset (I still can’t get past my cynicism over it and call it a belief system) which expects Light to overcome Dark at every turn, if the believer simply believes that it will. I hasten to add that I reject any analogy to the phrase “God wills it” or any variation thereof. Acceptance is a key component of mature response to adversity. The New Agers of this ilk, whom some Pagans refer to (scathingly) as fluffy bunnies, categorically reject the reality of adversity, and simply fail to acknowledge it.

From my perspective and experience, faith — using the term as I believe Rod would — is not a gift, an accomplishment, or a destination. It is a lived consciousness, akin to emotions, and articulating it can be very difficult. There’s an implied criticism there, as I know that many Christians will discuss faith as a gift. I will own that implication, but hope to soften it: one of Rod’s key arguments boils down to the fact that people do not come to a faith by osmosis. They are required to make an effort for it, sacrifice something for it, but in the end if it cannot be internalized and integrated in their minds and hearts, it remains superficial, and easily cast aside when it fails to be useful or becomes an impediment.

This is a core tenet of a very large majority of modern Pagans. One doesn’t simply proclaim the label. One is challenged to prove it with learning, demonstration (I do not mean spells or such) and commitment. In Wicca, an initiate to a coven is not invited. He or she embarks on a year-and-a-day of real work, as rigorous as any serious academic path, at end of which the question is asked, “Do you believe you have earned your place?” (I’m paraphrasing and extemporizing. Most covens won’t divulge any details over this.) They learn during that time that they are not being asked if they still want to join. They are being asked if they already belong.

Institutionalized religions, like public education, adopt an assembly line method. My image of it is a house being painted, without regard to whether it is raining on any given day, or if the temperature is preventing the paint from drying. The painter examines the finished job, and blames the house for the flaws and defects. That’s a direct criticism, by the way. There are better ways to do it, exemplified by the Hebrew school curriculum that culminates in a bar or bat mitzvah.

I’m not saying they all do it that way. I am suggesting that the anecdotal evidence of my senses plus the many stories I’ve read and heard point to the fact that most of them do it that way, don’t see the ineffectiveness of it until it’s too late, and tend to blame the departed former believer for their failures.

That is my take on the following excerpt.

Lehner:

Realism means being in touch with the real world, with real things. Often I have the impression that we are running away from reality and focusing on feels as if emotions were the only real thing. Through my experience with religious education textbooks and catechesis classes in both Germany and the United States, I have come to see that much of our parish life is centered on sentimentality or the chasing of feelings. Children are invited to “feel” and “experience” this or that, but they are rarely given any content for their faith. It does not surprise me that they leave the Church if they find better feelings elsewhere.

As Chesterton taught us, “We need to be reminded more than we need to be instructed.” Hence, allow me to quote the beginning of one of Cardinal Newman’s sermons (readily available on the internet in whole).

The Religion of the Day

“Let us have grace, whereby we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear. For our God is a consuming fire.” Heb. xii. 28, 29.

IN every age of Christianity, since it was first preached, there has been what may be called a religion of the world, which so far imitates the one true religion, as to deceive the unstable and unwary. The world does not oppose religion as such. I may say, it never has opposed it. In particular, it has, in all ages, acknowledged in one sense or other the Gospel of Christ, fastened on one or other of its characteristics, and professed to embody this in its practice; while by neglecting the other parts of the holy doctrine, it has, in fact, distorted and corrupted even that portion of it which it has exclusively put forward, and so has contrived to explain away the whole;—for he who cultivates only one precept of the Gospel to the exclusion of the rest, in reality attends to no part at all. Our duties balance each other; and though we are too sinful to perform them all perfectly, yet we may in some measure be performing them all, and preserving the balance on the whole; whereas, to give ourselves only to this or that commandment, is to incline our minds in a wrong direction, and at length to pull them down to the earth, which is the aim of our adversary, the Devil.

Materialism seems to me to be a much more difficult to sustain position than any sort of supernatural belief in God. ….

Plus progressive Christians, generally speaking, seem to be motivated in their beliefs by a strong desire for justice and kindness, and the position of atheism would seem to make it very hard to maintain a commitment to those terms. Working toward social justice, eliminating oppression, advocating for the weak and powerless, etc. makes a lot more sense if one believes in an ideal cosmic order than if one believes in pure materialism.

I’m not an atheist, but I would think many of those who are see it as just the reverse. If there’s an all-powerful God with a divine plan for everything, then there’s less, not more, reason for human beings to take responsibility for the state of the world. Whereas if there is no God, then the only hope for a more humane and peaceable world is that we get busy and make it so.

This is why your book has gotten such uneven traction. Because you obfuscate this point in a notable effort to appeal ecumenically to all Christian.

This is an interesting claim. I would say that a related issue is that the Benedict Option is a call for greater rigor — a more strenuous commitment to and exercise of the faith. (Any faith, for that matter; we often see non-Christians who are rigorous in their own practices held up here as positive models.)

The fact is the most people are not rigorists and never have been. That’s why the history of Christianity is a history of revival movements: the Cluniac Reform, the Lutheran and then the Radical Reformations, Puritanism, Pietism, Methodism, the Great Awakenings, and on up to the 20th century’s tent meetings and the Billy Sunday / Billy Graham-style movements. In every age, it seems, there are those who believe that Christianity is fading or becoming just an empty shell of meaningless rituals, and that Christians need to reconnect with it in some basic way and get cranked up about it again.

Some people take to this enthusiastically; they like the feeling of being cranked up over something. Most do not. Human beings do not take naturally to rigor. In that, they are closely related to other mammals, most of whom like to sleep a lot.